221B Barker Street
by mromanova
Summary: A young man called Sherlock and his German Shepherd John solve cases and chase after villains in London. But this one case, starting with a boy with a broken skull and plaster beneath his nails and leading to a mysterious M, may not only show Sherlock and John the abyss, but drag them into it. AU.


**Hi!**

**This is my first Sherlock fanfic and I hope it will get noticed in this gigantic sea of wonderful and clever and emotional Sherlock fanfics.**

**Disclaimer: It all belongs to Moffat and Gatiss who still haven't given us Series Three.  
**

**Enjoy!**

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**CHAPTER ONE**

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**For as long **as he could remember, man and creature alike had shied away from Sherlock. It was something about his tall, thin frame, his slightly ethereal facial features, but most of all his penetrating gaze nobody could escape that put people off. As he got older, he decided he was content with that; most people were extremely unappealing anyway. Their mundanity, hypocrisy and hubris repelled him. Being a social outcast ended up being advantage.

So when he entered the small pet shop on a deserted street in Hampstead, the shop he went to when he needed a fine_r _nose for a particularly complex case, he was as usual not expecting anything unusual whether from the owner, a confused little old lady, as from the creatures she sold.

The old lady looked up from her Sunday Times crossword as the door closed shut behind him with a tingling of the bell hanging over it.

"Mrs. Mason," he greeted her with a slight bow of his head. As of late, his voice had gotten even darker, thus adding to his apparently intidimidating character. Fortunately, Mrs. Mason was one of those old little ladies that were more prone to accept all kinds of people, probably because she'd never had children of her own.

"Oh, Mr. Holmes," she replied, blinking, taking her glasses off with a trembling hand. "You're here for little Gladstone, aren't you?" Without waiting for a reply, she slowly got up from behind the counter. "I'll fetch him for you then. Would like you some tea before you leave?"

He gave her a smile then, a genuine one, one he reserved for Mrs. Hudson and the completion of cases. "Thank you, Mrs. Mason, but I can't stay. It'll have to be next time."

"Pity," Mrs. Mason mumbled as she shuffled along the aisle of cages, cartons and aquariums. "I'd just bought a new kettle and all..." Her voice died away as she descended into the depths of the store.

Sherlock didn't really know what to do with himself while he waited. The creatures around him, the bright parrots, the darting rabbits and the overfed guinea pigs were just as much a bore as any human, in some ways even more. What could you deduce about a guinea pig but its dietary habits and perhaps status among the other guinea pigs? With humans you could at least see what they were trying to hide, what they thought they had succeeded in hiding. What had a guinea pig to hide?

He found himself drifting off to the larger animals' section, yipping and meowling coming from cages and cartons. Feline eyes followed him as he passed, noses pressed against bars to catch his scent. Nicotine and expensive wool and London rain, that's what he smelled of. With a dash of antiseptic from St. Barts´.

He peered into the depths of a carton and saw a litter of Alsatians, of German Shepherd puppies milling about, climbing over and under each other, just old enough to have opened their eyes and taken their first steps. He didn't know what came over him then, what made him do it, but at once he reached into the carton and offered his hand. An experiment, he thought. A gesture of curiousity.

As expected, the puppies didn't react or even moved shyly but with distinct determination away from his hand. All expect one. Half-crawling, one of its legs shorter than the other, the smallest of the litter came up to him and touched his outstretched fingers with its snout. For the first and only time in Sherlock's life, he felt his jaw drop.

And that was how he met John.

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**John loved toast **with jam, even though he could only enjoy it on special occasions, Sherlock didn't want to kill the dog after all. John loved to sleep on the knitted sweaters Sherlock's mother sent him during the holidays. Most of all, John loved to leap alongside Sherlock as they chased after clues and villains, as they tore through the streets and alleys and avenues of London.

John was the one to tear Sherlock out of bed and his pajamas during sunny crimeless days and get him to move. John reminded him when to eat and when to rest and when to calm down. In some ways the now grown up Alsatian took more care of Sherlock than the other way round.

In the beginning, the first awkward days when Sherlock had brought the puppy home, he hadn't expected anything special. He'd thought that the puppy would become useful in some of his cases. That was what he had told himself; he needed a dog for its nose and ears and nothing else... But then something happened. He'd given the puppy a name, John, after a neighbor had played _Imagine _for half a dozen days in a row and the bloody song'd got stuck in his head, and he started really appreciating the companionship, he started needing it. Then, somewhere along the away, their lives became interwoven somehow, and instead of "_Oh, there's that freak Sherlock Holmes" _he heard "_Oh, there's that freak Sherlock Holmes and his dog."_

And it made all the difference.

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**The boy's head **was bashed in, like a pumpkin with its meat spilling out, a torn toy with stuffing strewn all over the ground. Only this wasn't a toy but a human and it was brains on the ground, cells that had once held thoughts and feelings and memories. But Sherlock was happy the literally bloody mess was still there, it was rare the crime scenes were as untouched as now.

The boy, Sherlock couldn't call him anything else than that, 19 years old and just out of school (the signs of the hangover after his graduation still only fading from the body), hadn't died of the head trauma though. He knew that without having anything analyzed, knew by first look. The medical examiners and the inspectors at the scene would see it that way though, of course they would, until, weeks later, the evidence would prove them wrong. At that point Sherlock would have solved the case and would be sitting back in his armchair with a nice cup of tea and Mrs. Hudson's scones and discussing the stupidity of the London police force with John.

What revealed the true nature of the crime was the plaster beneath the boy's nails, plaster dug in painfully deep. As if he'd scratched at something, a wall most likely, to free himself from the grip of someone. But the body was lying in the middle of the woods, at the end of a jogging lane, having lied half-hidden behind a cluster of bushes until an unfortunate jogger had caught sight of it. There were no plaster walls in sight.

Of course, the plaster could have been nothing, could have been a sign of the wild graduation party maybe, if it hadn't been for the needle prick at the base of the boy's neck, a prick that was barely visible thanks to half the skull having been disattached. And that was not the end of it, no, thanks to John, whose nose lingered slightly longer over that little red dot, Sherlock realized the case was much more complicated than he'd originally thought. There was a faint whiff of antiseptic over the needle prick. If the boy'd been poisoned by whatever he had been injected, why the antiseptic? No, whatever had been injected hadn't meant to kill the boy. But whatever it was, experimental medication, a cult ritual, it had gone wrong, very wrong, and the boy had ended up reacting lethally to it. He'd been in a room, locked inside the a room, panicked as he felt death breathe down his neck and scratched at the walls in desperation, screamed to be let out. But the other person or people, they hadn't called emergency, so whatever was going on, it was secret, it was illegal. When the boy'd at last died, they'd quickly bashed the skull in to hide the needle prick, to mislead, a red herring, stripped him of his valuables so it'd look like a robbery and dropped him off in the woods.

Sherlock looked up from the body and met the steady gaze of his companion. He cocked an eyebrow, feeling the elation in his blood, in his _marrow_.

"Ready?" he asked.

John tensed his muscles and pricked his ears and that was all the answer Sherlock needed.

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**Please leave a review so I can hear what you thought of it! What do I need to improve, or what is it I do well?**

**Hopefully this is going places. **

**Until next time!**


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